Five months earlier.

It had taken the better part of a year for Detective Fog to get the mafia's youngest recruited button man to talk to her, and what Paul Aniston had to tell her was very useful.

Somewhere over the course of the past six months, the mafia had done something to scare him senseless or to otherwise lose his loyalty, and when Fog got close enough to him, he sang like a canary. He never would have done that if he believed in their cause as devotedly as he once had.

First, Detective Fog had to befriend his wife, Cassandra, and spend many innocent or less than innocent nights out on the town with the couple. She kept a tight lid on her profession, on what she did for a living, and when it did come out that she was a private investigator, she made it sound like all she did was take pictures of people sleeping around. When Paul came by her office one night, she assumed it was to follow Cassandra and see if his wife was sleeping around with anyone, but it turned out his purpose was slightly different.

After one glass of Drambuie, he confessed that he wanted to murder his wife, and he wanted to know the best way to get away with it. Then he tried to kiss Detective Fog.

Apparently, the other thing she had tried to do with her reputation was paying off, which was to make criminals think of her as one of those crooked crime advisors, usually lawyers like on The Wire or Breaking Bad, who told their clients how to cover up and get away with illegal activity. Not that she was a lawyer, but her skill set would be attractive to a budding spouse murderer.

She veered away from the kiss and his mouth smacked her cheekbone instead of her lips. Businesslike, she pulled out her phone, stopped its recording of their conversation, and played it back to him.

It was a play she couldn't have planned better herself.

Now she had her very own mafia button man within her grasps. Blackmail, with solid proof. She had to explain to him that there was no way out.

"Don't think you can just have me knocked off, now. I have a partner, and this audio file is stored in the cloud. I mean if I'm being honest, if you killed both of us at the same time, you might get away with it, but I have a plan. This particular leverage is two-pronged — I can play the conversation for Cassandra, or I can play it to the police. Or I can play the conversation to Cassandra and hold on to option number two for a rainy day, and now there are three of us who know about the audio file and you'll have to kill all three to keep it from putting you away for conspiracy to commit murder. So, we good?"

"Please don't tell Cassandra," Paul begged, and after he got those words out, he choked on anything else it occurred to him to say, or maybe he had no idea what else to say. It would ruin his marriage? Or he still wanted to be able to commit the murder?

"Look, I'm sorry, it's nothing personal, except for the fact that you're a terrifying psycho, and I'd very much love to destroy your life, but I think this plan is bulletproof, and it requires me to tell Cassandra, and Jimmy, and then I make sure that Jimmy, Cassandra and I are never in a room together so you can't kill us all at once. Now that I think of it, you could still coordinate a synchronized hit, but Jimmy's a really good shot, you'll have a hard time taking him out, and you've already let me in on a weakness; you don't have the slightest clue as to how to get away with murdering your wife.

"The idea you ran by me was crap, you might as well go turn this recorded conversation over to the cops yourself, if you're going to chop her into tiny pieces and throw her in the bay. Where did you get that idea from, Dexter? You're watching too much TV and smoking too much ganja to learn from what you've seen on TV. Dexter never had any connection to the victims, idiot, this is your own wife. You're suspect number one. So I'm going to tell Cassandra you want to kill her and she can take whatever measures she feels necessary to protect herself from you."

"I'll tell you anything you want to know about the Sigler Mafia right now if you promise not to tell her. I assume you plan to use this leverage to get me to talk, and it can be a painful process like pulling teeth, or it can be easy as pie."

That was how she got Paul to tell her about Mayor Banikas's murder. Easy as pie.

"Gravenites was a fall guy," said Paul. "The real murderer was Thalia Zane."

"You got any proof?" asked Detective Fog. She had the proof. She had Thalia Zane's hair at the scene, which Athena had confirmed with a DNA test. She had some clout with the lab tech who ran it for her in her lunch break without being told what it pertained to. But the DNA was inadmissible, and Paul could give her something better.

Only from the wide-eyed look on his face, Paul didn't have any evidence either. "Just how do you know it was Thalia?" Malyssa asked.

"It's not a secret. She's become a hero in the mob. Everyone knows she did Banikas."

"Funny the police haven't caught wind of that, as if they don't have ears and snitches, Paulie."

"Maybe the mob knows who the ears and snitches are, maybe we don't talk to them. Their time is coming."

Some of that sort of made sense. If Paul couldn't give her bulletproof evidence on Thalia, maybe he could still explain a couple of questions about the murder. "How did Thalia Zane persuade Mayor Banikas to enter that building with her and accompany her to that abandoned apartment?"

"Why would I know that any better than you? I wasn't involved in the murder, no one's talking that kind of detail."

"Any guesses? You know her, you hear things. I'm sure you could guess better than I could," said Detective Fog.

"What excellent use of your blackmail leverage, demanding I make shit up that I have no way of knowing."

She gave him a look that made him shrug his shoulders as if to say, "Have it your way." To the look, she added, "Humor me. Tell me your top three guesses."

"She promised him a good time," said Paul.

"She's a lesbian, but sure, I'll count that as one guess. No reason she can't promise a sexual encounter as a ruse. What else?"

"Maybe she had him at gunpoint already and made it sound like she was just taking him somewhere for a chat. Then she gets him somewhere private where she can get away with it. Maybe she had something on him to blackmail him with. Again, he wouldn't know she'd kill him if she got him alone in that apartment, maybe she just had some demands to make. It would have to be pretty killer blackmail, though, because he'd know assassination was a possibility no matter what kind of sweet talk she pulled."

"So you're leaning towards a simple walk at gunpoint, then?"

"Sure, let's go with that. Was that helpful? Cuz if you want me to sit here making up stories and lying in exchange for your silence, I can do that all night. Or I can think of something more fun we can do."

"It's helpful," said Detective Fog. "Next question, the building where the mayor was killed, what's so special about it? How come so many people were coming in and out of it back then, when there's only a dozen units? Are they mafia?"

"We kept a brothel there up until the murder. It gave scouts time to come and go, make sure the location was secure while blending in with a hundred other people coming and going over a few months, right?"

"Fine," said Detective Fog. "That takes care of my curiosity. But it's time to get real. I know Thalia Zane was not the only person in that room with Mayor Banikas. I want you to confirm the other people present, and then I want you to explain what so many people were doing there, just laughing at the man like a bunch of hyenas before he died? Does it take that many people to make the body disappear? What were they all doing there?"

"I don't know anything about that. I wasn't there."

"Don't give me that, you lied and said it was only Thalia. Trying to save some of your buddies? What, you don't like her, but you want Jason Nakos and Nick Minardos to slip through my fingers?"

"I didn't lie. That's what everyone's saying."

"Where were you the day of the murder?"

"I hung out at the Daedalus Bar," said Paul.

"And then?"

"At some point, I went home. I don't sleep there."

"Oh, come on, don't pretend you don't remember. Everyone in the city remembers where they were the afternoon Mayor Banikas was murdered. You know where you were."

"I was pretty pissed that day. Drinking since morning. Cassandra put me in a real bad mood that morning, whining as usual. I must be having an affair because I had to be making more with the mob than I was telling her and then spending it on someone else. I mean, I don't remember particularly why I was drinking, but if I was drinking, it must have been that."

"So you got soapy-eyed, sloshy, loaded to the hilt, positively zozzled, and then what?"

"Don't remember."

"You weren't there when they killed Mayor Banikas?"

"That I think I would remember," said Paul.

Okay, so it wasn't easy as pie. It was more like pulling teeth after all, despite all promises.

"Let me refresh your memory, then. At 5:21, Jason Nakos came into Daedalus Bar. At 6:01, you left the bar and walked west downhill on Geary. In a matter of minutes, you were followed by at least five other mobsters, including Jason Nakos but not Thalia Zane, the last of which was Nick Minardos. After a seven minute walk west, Nick Minardos slipped into the building where Mayor Banikas was murdered at 6:28. So my question to you is, where did you go at 6:01 p.m. on May 3rd? Actually, don't answer that, I don't want to play around anymore. Tell me why so many Mafiosi of importance dirtied their hands with Mayor Banikas, and I'll ignore the fact that you were there and that you lied to me. You and I can just pretend you were innocently keeping six outside the door and had no idea what they were doing in there."

"Okay, I was keeping six outside the door. Nick wasn't there, though. I don't know how Thalia got the mayor into the apartment. I came after. Some of those guys you saw went ahead to the location where they moved the body to, to make sure the area was clear and secure."

"And that location is—?"

"I don't know."

"I'm going to need you to find out for me, Paulie."

"Look, I'm not your puppet. You don't get to control me and make me do whatever you want with me for the rest of forever. There comes a point where I'd rather go to jail for conspiracy to commit murder than get myself killed, right?"

Malyssa grinned like the Cheshire Cat at him, which was terrifying, and he shrunk back in his seat when she took something else out of her jacket, a second phone, recording an audio file. Paul groaned, then in a desperate split-second decision, launched himself off the chair at the detective, scrabbling for the phone. She yanked it out of arm's reach a second after she hit the pause button and said, "Get off, it's saved to the cloud," while pinned down by Paul's entire body.

He took the phone from her anyway, and she let him. "I have it set up to backup in like twelve places," she told him as he stared at the phone as if it were alien technology, looking for a way to delete it. "Now my leverage isn't incrimination, it's death by mafia. They hear you telling me all about the Banikas murder, you're dead. So now you are, in fact, my puppet."

Paul whipped the phone against the office door, where it smashed into pieces. Detective Fog didn't care, it was a cheap old smartphone, a couple of years behind the trends, and although the file was in fact in the cloud, she had been bluffing on the multiple backups — she had no idea how to set that up on a crappy old phone, let alone her new iPhone. The file was in Dropbox, but the delete button would have been the end of that.

"You were telling me what all those Mafiosi were doing on the day of the murder. How many went to the body drop location? Names?"

Paul answered her questions with the compliance of a dead man walking. The poor guy had been string-free just minutes earlier, an up and coming button man, with the mafia owing him an immense debt of gratitude. A couple wrong choices in a matter of minutes, and his life was now over.

Detective Fog had stood out in the hallway, so the way Paul told it had to be adjusted — he wasn't out there too; he was in the room with Mayor Banikas. Thalia Zane made her bones that afternoon, Paul said, shooting Mayor Banikas once in the head and once in the chest. He said he learned afterward why a girl who'd never killed before was given this important job — after that hit Sigler owned her, Sigler knew without a doubt that Thalia would never become a snitch, to the police or to the Andreous. She could be trusted with absolutely any task because she was the most wanted man in San Francisco's history after the Zodiac Killer and before Dan White, who turned himself over quickly enough after murdering City Supervisor Harvey Milk so as to not count as wanted for long anyways.

Jason Nakos was the one to seal up the wounds and prep the body to vanish in fifty-five minutes or so. And that was it, the way Paul told it: Nick wasn't there, the other mobsters Detective Fog had seen had gone to the body drop location, Thalia got the mayor there and shot him, and Jason Nakos was responsible for the magic

Detective Fog drummed her fingers on her suited pants leg.

If Paul wasn't outside watching, making sure no one walked in on them, what was he doing there? Why include another witness, which was now costing Sigler greatly, if he didn't have a purpose?

She couldn't decide whether it mattered. She had almost all of her answers. In a couple of days, Paul could find out for her where the bodies were taken. Surely his memory could be jogged to give her the names of the mobsters who staked out the drop location, and she already had a few names and pictures. Most of her questions had been answered.

"Where did Nick go?" She didn't really care, although if he wasn't in the apartment with the mayor, that would mean two purposeless witnesses, not one. She had followed Nick to the building. Paul couldn't pretend Nick wasn't there.

"He just roamed the building, patrolling the halls." Detective Fog doubted that. She hadn't bumped into anyone patrolling. Although the thought chilled her intestines that Nick could have found her eavesdropping at the door had that been the case.

So it sounded like Paul and Nick were both in the room with Mayor Banikas, Thalia Zane, and Jason Nakos. And she couldn't figure out what those two were doing there other than standing around picking their noses. Calling Paul's bluff would give away she had been in the building, something she didn't want to confirm at this time, even if it might be obvious if he thought about it. Let him continue to think she believed him, but clearly, he was hiding something. The good part was she now had a target. Thalia Zane was going down. Jason Nakos, and Nick, and the mobsters at the corpse drop location could go down with her.

Uncrossing her legs, Detective Fog got off the comfy couch and dismissed Paul. She'd had enough of him for one night, and she wanted to congratulate herself for a job well done with a nice whisky cocktail. Alone.

Paul scrambled to get out of that office and close the door between himself and that hyena. The second he got into the hallway, he collapsed back against the door, heart thudding, sure beyond sure that if Detective Fog knew that he had been the one to shoot Mayor Banikas through the head, she would do very, very bad things to him.

Through the deep gulps of breath he took to steady himself, the calming thought came to him that even though he never could have foreseen getting stuck in this situation with a rabid PI, he had had the foresight to bring a hairball of Thalia's red strands and drop it at the crime scene.

Because he still hadn't trusted that he wasn't to be Sigler's fall guy.

Thank you for reading Detective Fog. This story updates often and always on Fridays. If you're looking for more of the Constellations series to read, the books can be read in any order. Check out Stars Rise to see how the stories intersect; the easter eggs from reading these two books together will be really fun. I am so grateful for your support and your stars!